Don't discount motivation of Generation Me!

I watch too much TV and spend too much time on the computer. I often spend too much money on clothes. I get lazy and don’t do my homework. My room is sometimes a mess. I fight with my parents. It’s hard for me to imagine life without technology.

There’s an entire generation of people just like me. We are called Generation Me, often scathingly.

We are lazy, over privileged, immoral and spoiled.

Newspaper columnists write long passages on how when we take power, things will steadily go downhill from the current happy life of the baby boomer generation.

The family unit of mother, father and 2.5 children will be lost to teenage pregnancy and gay marriage.

None of us are willing to work without praise and scorn the values of the older generations.

Some of this true. But all is not lost.

We are a generation of innovation and change.

Every day there are new inventions to improve the human condition. Be it the newest form of smart phone or the robot who has intelligence close to that of human beings.

Every day there is new intelligence on everything.

There are advances in understanding the complexities of the human body, which will hopefully lead to a cure for cancer.

The new generation now has the technology that will make these discoveries infinitely easier. Can people even imagine a life without computers nowadays?

If one needs to find out the year when Abraham Lincoln was born, all that needs to be done is a quick Google search or a scan of a Wikipedia article.

Fifty years ago, there would be time lost in searching for books in the library to search for one small fact.

The new generation has this information quickly and effortlessly, which gives us more time to learn and do more things.

We are also a generation that scorns the values of our parents. We are rude, thankless, resenting of small slights and intolerant of a little discomfort.

But perhaps we need a little bit of caution in blind following of the older generation.

We have been left the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression with no end in sight.

There is a debt of more than $300 trillion which seems to have no immediate solution.

There is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tension with the Middle East and an economic meltdown in Europe, all of which will need resolution.

It will be our generation’s job to fix such problems.

There is an environmental crisis but lethargic efforts to fix it.

Our generation will devise major economic reforms like that of Roosevelt or Reagan.

We will fix international conflicts and our resolution will be taught in schools to the generation after us.

We will fix the environment and our polar ice caps will return to their size and hybrid cars will be common.

It is not arrogant to say these things. It is human nature to fix a crisis.

If it is a necessity to fix something -- a dire situation in absolute need of reparation -- it is human nature to fix it.

It is also in human nature for older generations to complain about the new ones because the thing that makes generations different is change.

And change is scary.

So while our generation fixes the problems the older generation left for us, we will undoubtedly leave problems for the newer generation, grumbling about how times are changing the entire time.